Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #3
Roanoke, VA - Sat, 31 Aug 2024. 11pm

The flying part of our trip today ended when we landed at Charlotte (CLT) in North Carolina. Things went reasonably smoothly at the airport and the car rental depot. We were on the road to Roanoke by 5:15pm.

It was about 200 miles from CLT to our hotel Roanoke, a drive of just under 3 hours— though an accident ahead of us in a construction zone on one of the highways cost us an additional 35 minutes. It was close to 9pm by the time we checked in to our hotel.

"Why fly to CLT then drive to Roanoke?" you might ask. "Roanake has an airport, too."

Yes, we could have flown here. Indeed, the hotel we're at tonight is right next to Roanoke's airport! But there's a method to the seeming madness. When I travel, there is always a plan to my route; a plan I've made after carefully considering many alternatives. We flew via CLT and drove to Roanoke because Roanoke is not the only place we're visiting. After a few days in Virginia we'll loop back around, by car, to the area near Asheville, NC. Yes, Asheville has an airport, too! But, like Roanoke's, it's a small, regional one. Flying via a major airport and renting a car, once, to drive around to less populous areas is the most convenient way to do this.

After sharing a few nice hawk pics from the Carolina Raptor Center yesterday I've got a few more to share today. These two aren't hawks; they're vultures. Carrion eaters. Technically they're raptors, a somewhat loosely defined category of carnivorous birds that seize prey. (The word raptor comes from a Latin verb that means to seize and carry off.)

First up today is a turkey vulture.




The species is found across much of North and South America. In the US it's especially common in the southwest. Out in California, for example, I see turkey vultures constantly.

Vultures occupy a macabre but important part in they cycle of life. They are nature's gravediggers. Though instead of digging graves for dead bodies they eat them.

Turkey vultures have a number of interesting biological adaptations to fit their role in the ecosystem. A key one I chose the picture above to highlight is their bald heads. The red skin on their scalp is how they got the name turkey vulture. From a distance their head resembles a turkey's. Up close, though, they look ghoulish. (BTW, if this bird were to turn slightly sideways you'd see straight through its nostrils.) The featherless head allows it to plunge not just its beak into a carcass but to stick its head in all the way up to the neck, without splatting soaking its feathers in blood and guts that become a hygiene problem.

As far as eating blood and guts— but mostly dead, rotting meat? Turkey vultures have incredibly acidic stomachs. They're, like, a 1 on the pH scale. Their stomach acid breaks down meat so they can digest the proteins faster than bacteria in the flesh (like the ones that cause botulism in humans) can make them sick. And parasites? Ha, ha, stomach acid.

There are a lot of other facts I could share about vultures (and when we were visiting these birds at the Carolina Raptor Center a an enthusiastic staffer nearby told us she could talk for hours about vultures) but instead of that I'll share another bird pic first.

This next bird is an Andean condor.



The Andean condor ranges along the west coast of South America— in, well, the Andes. Like the turkey vulture it's a carrion eater. You can see it has the same adaptation of a featherless head.

Andean condors are huge birds, with adult wingspans of 10 - 10.5 feet (up to 3.2 meters). This is much larger than the turkey vulture— which is not exactly a small bird, having adult wingspans of about 6 feet (2.9 m). It's even larger than the California condor, which I thought was the largest raptor species in the world until I saw this bird's display.

The white ruff on this bird's neck is interesting. It reminds me of how vultures were always depicted in the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons years ago. That's a geographical misplacement, as the cartoons were set in the colorful red rock country of the US Southwest, particularly the kind of landscapes with narrow rock towers and arches found in southern Utah, while this species is only found 5,000 miles away. All I can figure is that some of the Looney Tunes artists saw an Andean condor on a visit to South America, or perhaps in a zoo or even a picture book back home, and were impressed by the fur-like collar as an evocative characteristic to use in their art.

On the last day of our West Virginia & North Carolina trip last month we visited the Carolina Raptor Center in Huntsville, NC. It's close to Charlotte and CLT airport so it was easy for us to add to the last day of our trip when the only other thing we were doing was making the 10+ hour journey of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles home.

Compared to other raptor centers we've visited several times, the Carolina Raptor Center is more zoo-ish. That was a bit of a minus as it felt the birds were pushed farther away from us as there wasn't as much interaction with knowledgeable staff members. On the plus side, the more zoo-like orientation, versus the other centers serving as a rehabilitation clinics for injured birds of prey, means the Carolina Raptor Center has a wider collection of birds than predominantly North American native species.

This video I put together shows 3 birds from other parts of the world:

• The Andean Condor is native to the Andes Mountains on the western side of South America. It has the largest wingspan of all raptors, larger even than the California Condor. If the white feathered ruff around the bird's neck makes it look like you've seen it before, you likely have— in classic Looney Tunes cartoons. The bird in this video is not just flaring its wings for visitors but also vibrating its stomach. I'm not sure what the stomach motion is meant to do, whether that's to scare off predators (it's not at all scary to humans) or something else.


• The Grey Crowned Crane is native to East Africa. This bird is very showy, not just with that wild plume of feathers atop its head that looks like hair standing straight up, but also in the way it struts back and forth in its enclosure whenever new visitors arrive. The Grey Crowned Crane is an omnivore, eating grasses, seeds, and nuts along with insects and amphibians.


• The pair of Abyssinian Ground Hornbills are having fun poking at the remnants of the Sunday newspaper comics section. I'm not sure if that's a form of play for these birds or its part of their food gathering habit. In Central Africa, where they are native, they follow herds of grazing animals and predators, snapping up insects and small animals that dodge out of the way.

First off, yes, I'm still writing about our trip to West Virginia and North Carolina from last month. Yes, it's over 3 weeks since we returned home and I still haven't cleared the backlog of journal entries from it. But now I'm almost done. One of these last few I'm going to switch into the present tense instead of tying it to a particular day or location. Partly that's because it's about a question we discussing numerous times on the trip: "There are so many amazing waterfalls in North Carolina, why didn't we hike them when we lived here?"

Like I said, the thought occurred to us not just once but multiple times over the course of a few days. I blogged once about it already; see Why didn't we do this when we LIVED here? That blog reflects our first discussion on the matter. We came up with a few answers, partial answers, to the question. They still left us wondering. As we thought about it more we found better clarity. Ultimately the conundrum of "Why didn't we do this years ago?" comes down to three big things: Information, Money, and Time.

1) Information was arguably the biggest obstacle to us visiting all these waterfalls, or even a few of them, when we lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, many years ago. For this trip we found so much information online in website and blogs and via apps like AllTrails. When we were in NC in the mid 90s none of that existed. We had to find info in books. And yes, there were books back then. We saw plenty of books about waterfall hikes in gift shops on this trip, in 2023. But in the 1990s those books were fewer and not as widely distributed. ...And, no, it's not for lack of looking. Back in the 1990s "Let's stop in this bookstore and look around" was a regular thing. And I did find books on hiking in the state... but only a few, and most of them weren't very lucid. It's nothing like the wealth of information a person can find online with a minute or two of searching today.

2) Money. Money was another big obstacle. As "poor starving grad students" the idea of spending a weekend going somewhere and staying at a hotel for a few nights was pretty much outside the realm of possibility for us. We were happy doing day-trips... and indeed we did several memorable day-trips the summer we lived together in Chapel Hill. But getting over to the part of the state we visited on this 2023 trip would've taken most of a day just for the round-trip drive, leaving not that much time for actually hiking. It would've worked better as a weekend getaway— which we could ill afford.

3) Time. "Time is our most precious resource," I've said many times. Alas when I was a poor, starving grad student I wasn't just poor and starving. ...Actually I wasn't starving; I always had enough to eat. What I didn't have was free time. As a grad student you internalize that there is always, always, something else you should be doing to advance your studies. The mindset is not 9-to-5, it's 24/7. Everything that's not actively getting you closer to your doctorate, or to a publication, is a poor choice you should reconsider. Thus the number of trips I took in my 3 years in North Carolina was very few. Yes, it's ironic that now, many years later, I find it easier to carve out the time to travel to North Carolina from across the country than to visit it more widely when I lived there. But that's life.... Or rather, grad student life.

North Carolina Travelog #25
Sapphire, NC - Sat, 23 Sep 2023. 10am

We're headed out for another day of hiking. It's our last full day on this trip. How time flies! The day started on a downbeat note, though. The weather forecast called for clouds most of the day— presumably an effect of Hurricane Ophelia that made landfall in North Carolina a few hours ago!

Fortunately for us the hurricane made landfall at the southeastern tip of the state around 6am today and headed mostly north. We're well to the west. And those morning clouds covering our hotel when we left 45 minutes ago? Once we drove into the hills west of town we found that the clouds are only hanging in valleys. Even slightly higher up there's beautiful sun. And now even the valley fog seems to be burning off. We're now looking forward to great weather this last full day of hiking in North Carolina!

North Carolina Travelog #15
Back at the hotel - Thu, 21 Sep 2023. 10pm

Today has been an amazing day. We went on several hikes and visited a whopping 10 waterfalls... all within a 30-45 minute driving radius of our hotel. I didn't even realize it was 10— I kind of lost count after 5 or 6— until we got back to our hotel room this evening and I sorted through my pictures.

As deliriously happy as we were throughout the day we also had moments of self criticism. You know, that feeling you have when you're doing something that is amazing and you pause to reflect, "Okay, this is amazing.... Why didn't I do it sooner?"

In our case "sooner" could have been twenty-some years ago when we lived in North Carolina. We lived here. Well, not here-here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We lived a few hours away in Chapel Hill, NC. I was doing my grad work there, and Hawk stayed with me two summers between finishing her undergrad in another city. We could have made weekend trips out here.

North Carolina Travelog #2
Pisgah National Forest, NC - Wed, 20 Sep 2023. 3:30pm

We got off to a late start today. After arriving at our hotel last night close to 11pm we were awake until almost 1am. We slept in past 9 today and didn't get rolling until after 11. Fortunately we're staying close to the action so it was a short drive out to an area rich with hikes. We stopped first at the Pisgah National Forest visitors center a few miles from town to check up on trails and conditions. A helpful but self-important volunteer gave us lots of suggestions on where to go the next few days.

We've kicked off today with a hike to Twin Falls. Ironically we were just at Twin Falls State Park yesterday... but that was West Virginia. This is North Carolina. Totally different falls.



We started near a creek and hiked upstream to the back of a canyon. There were found first the larger of the two twin falls. (They're not really twins.) We were astonished by how tall this falls is. In multiple drops and cascades it falls probably 300 feet. As we started to climb up to the base of one of the larger tiers the higher reaches disappeared from sight.



We sat for a while near this triple tier of the falls. Then it was time to go hunting the twin. We knew it was at the back of an adjacent corner of the canyon; we'd seen a glimpse of it on the way in. But would a slick, steep, muddy trail get us over there?



It turns out the trail was fine. ...Well, the trail was pretty rough actually, but it was fine for us with good shoes and skills. You can see in this photo, BTW, that these falls are not at all twins. There are two of them, and they're both waterfalls, but that's as far as the similarities go.



This falls wasn't quite as pleasant to spend time sitting at, though we did have fun walking the narrow footpath through the hollow behind the falls. The first step through the water on the high side was like taking a quick shower. After that it was just drippiness from the wet rock wall plus spatter from the falls. The weather is just warm enough we didn't care about getting damp. Plus, we have dry clothes in the car if needed.

Speaking of the car, we're back down to the trailhead now. Despite starting late today we have time to visit at least one more falls, maybe two. Again, that's the benefit of staying close to the action!

West Virginia Travelog #20 / North Carolina Travelog #1
Brevard, NC - Tue, 19 Sep 2023. 11:30pm

Whew, it's been a long day. We wrapped up our visit to West Virginia... with a bridge, surprise waterfalls, and more waterfalls... and then journeyed to Brevard, NC, to begin the second half of our 9 day trip. In total today we drove a whopping 387 miles through 4 states... eclipsing by one mile yesterday's driving of 386 miles!

We arrived at the Hampton Inn, our home for the next 5 days, to find pictures of waterfalls everywhere. There were pics of waterfalls in the lobby, in the hall, and at the front desk. Hey, this is our kind of place!

When I asked the gal at the front desk about one of the pictures, she not only knew which falls it was but (a) told us how to get there, (b) suggested another waterfall nearby, and (c) gave us a booklet of area waterfalls. This is our kind of place!

Then, as we headed up to our room, we found another waterfall pic in the elevator, one in the hall near our room, and one in our room... in the bathroom! 🤣



This is our kind of place.

West Virginia Travelog #2
Beckley, WV - Sat, 16 Sep 2023. 12:30pm


Those are the opening words of a famous American song John Denver released as a single in 1971. "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is famous around the English speaking world— I've read that many Brits think it's our national anthem— and it has a special meaning to me. Although I never lived in West Virginia, the two geographic features it name-checks in its opening words are places I knew and loved in Virginia when I grew up there. Today, though, we're driven those country roads to West Virginia. ...Well, okay, it was mostly Interstate 77 we drove today, but it passed through beautiful and remote country. Does that count as a country road? 😅

The driving portion of our trip started when we landed at Charlotte (North Carolina) airport this morning. It was a 3 hour 15 minute drive to Beckley, WV, where we're staying the next three nights.

Some might wonder why we flew to NC when there are airports in WV. The reason is that we were able to get a nonstop red-eye from SFO to CLT. Flying to any point in WV, or an airport nearer to the border of it, would've required connecting flights. The added time for those would've meant a longer door-to-door time than the route we chose.

Have a Slow Day!

We were rolling in our rental car by 8:30 this morning. Our first order of business once clear of the airport was to find a quick breakfast. We tried a nearby 7-Eleven... they had nothing prepared for hot food. The rollers and warmers were all totally empty. Staff just didn't care about that part of their jobs.

Fortunately there was another 7-Eleven nearby... and that one, too, had totally lackadaisical staff. There were a few hot items ready to go, filling maybe 15% of the space, but then when I went to get a soda from the soda fountain I found that half the sodas weren't working and the other half were connected wrong. Like, really, how hard is it to recognize that "Diet Coke" is not the dispenser to hook up the "Orange Crush" syrup to? I mean, even if you're functionally illiterate, you could at least try sounding out the words. Or counting the letters. Or looking at their shapes.

We tried— and walked out of— a third convenience store before we struck gold on our 4th try. Good ol' QT. Their soda fountain selection was marvelous, and they had a whole kitchen running with hot food to order via kiosk. I ordered up a personal-sized pepperoni pizza while Hawk got a hot pretzel dusted with cinnamon.

Tunnels and Tolls

With something resembling breakfast in our bellies we started making tracks northward to West Virginia. From North Carolina we crossed into Virginia. I was surprised when I-77 traversed first one, then a second, big tunnel. They're the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel and the East River Mountain Tunnel. The latter is over a mile long. The odd thing to me is that neither tunnel crosses under a particularly high or treacherous mountain. Plenty of other Interstate routes would curve around these hills, gaining the 500' or so of elevation necessary to cross them. Here, engineers were like, "Yay, an excuse to use tons of dynamite!"

The second tunnel crossed us over into West Virginia. Yay! And there I-77 becomes a toll road. Boo. And it's not like the toll is even paying for all the dynamite required to bore those tunnels or the upkeep on them. Those tunnels are in Virginia; different state, different transportation budget.

$4.25 later we arrived in Beckley.

5 Days in the Desert travelog #10
Barstow, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 8am

We got an early start this morning, leaving the hotel by 7:30. Having breakfast in our room— Christmas morning breakfast of leftovers and cold cuts and crackers— helped us move things along quickly. And not more than about 5 miles from the hotel we passed the first picture worthy thing of the day. A road sign.



But not just any road sign. This is one of those Americana road signs you see on our great highways. We're on I-40 (I is for interstate highway) which begins in Barstow and ends 2,556 miles away on the East Coast of the US in Wilmington, North Carolina. Yes, I wrote 2,556 even though the sign states 2,554. The distance on the sign is to Wilmington city center, as per signage standards; the road continues a few miles further before ending about 2 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

Fortunately we're not driving 2,500+ miles today. We're only driving I-40 for about 78 miles, to the turnoff at Kelbaker Road to head north to Kelso Dunes.